Art Show: Lucy Williams

This British artist constructs meticulous works that pay homage to the utopian visions of modernist architects

Most Read

Seeing a work of art by Lucy Williams across the space of a gallery (or, for that matter, reproduced on a magazine page), you could easily mistake it for a painting or a print in plain old 2D. Close up and in person, you realize that you're looking into a kind of vertical mille-feuille. The London-based artist's re-creations of modernist structures—glass houses, airports, public swimming pools, hotels—are, in fact, bas-reliefs. Their painstakingly assembled layers are comprised of a hodgepodge of materials: painted bits of paper, Plexiglas, Bubble Wrap, balsa wood, cork, pebbles, wool, mortar, piano wire, the veil from a hat.

Williams wields a mean X-Acto knife. An exterior view of Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois, is a ticker-tape parade of tiny leaves carefully excised from colored paper. Her portrait of the library of Pierre Chareau's Maison de Verre in Paris is partially composed of hundreds of minuscule paper strips, each representing the spine of a book. "Cutting out all the elements can take weeks," she says, "especially when you're doing something like foliage. It's quite a difficult thing to perfect." In some pieces, such as Diving Pool, a background of cloud-filled sky is a needlepoint tapestry made by the artist—mostly. "I started farming out the skies to friends to finish, but I invariably got them back halfway through. 'I'm not doing that,' they'd say, 'that's ridiculous.'"

The artist has been single-minded about her choice of subject matter since completing postgraduate work at the Royal Academy Schools eight years ago. Her body of work now adds up to a world tour of mid-20th-century architecture, from the Yugoslavian Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair to a futuristic gas station in the Netherlands. Her scenes are always depopulated; a 2006 solo exhibition was wittily titled "The Day the Earth Stood Still," a reference to the classic alien-warns-of-nuclear-cataclysm movie. Her fascination with swimming pools might be a British thing. (See David Hockney.) "We didn't have them in England in the '50s. It was too cold. I'm not sure I could give up making my Case Study Houses with their lovely reflecting pools outside."

Her pieces can have a melancholy undertone. They look back to a time when architects built for a trouble-free future, a utopia that didn't quite pan out. And yet the buildings themselves, with their neat geometric forms, are inherently pleasurable to look at. Rendering them in warm colors, reversing the effects of time and weather, she restores the structures to their unblemished origins. "Lucy's not just creating architectural models," says New York–based art collector Stuart Ginsberg, who owns a pair of her reliefs. "There's an emotional content in her work that goes far beyond that."

Williams's primary sources are period photographs she digs up at the library of London's Royal Institute of British Architects. She's laid eyes on only a few of the buildings she's depicted, a number of which no longer exist. "I quite like the fact that I'm offering my own version of what the place is like. I don't need a 360-degree view to be able to re-create it." Often, visiting a building only gets in the way. Williams toured the Maison de Verre, but ended up "working backwards," she says, for a trio of images. "I literally had to find old photos of how it was, and only then could I almost understand my subject. Some of these buildings are completely changed from when they first went up. Different architecture springs up around them and makes them look different in turn."

She observes with enthusiasm that her work has become more complex over time. "There are buildings I wouldn't have dreamed of being able to re-create, but I can now. You become more skilled with all the effort you put in over the years." Her early pieces are spare and monochromatic—International Arrivals, from 2004, is nearly all white, gray, and black, with only a few touches of color—but such recent reliefs as Pavilion, created last year, are as bright and lively as children's kites. Learning to paint her own paper rather than relying on pre-colored material was a revelation. "I've never been a colorist, and it's been a slow evolution of turning up the colors. I feel like I'm in a sweetshop!"